Stories of Magic I Have Heard

Officially from everything I've heard Tanzania is 1/3 Christian, 1/3 Muslim, and 1/3 traditional beliefs.  The last 1/3 won't admit to it, and the Tanzanians I've asked have insisted the country is only Christian and Muslim, however, the topic of witches and witch doctors is there, and I recently had a student I don't know ask me how Europeans view witch doctors (they all think I'm from Europe).  Some things I've hear about witches are as follows. 

Things that are fairly well-known:

Loliondo--some healerman there has a magic cup that cures all sorts of things if you drink from it, which is all well and good until you stop taking your medication after the magic cup.  Trust but verify, yo.

Albino bits--getting a witch doctor to prepare you some special meal from some organ of an albino (the liver, I think?) will give you power.  Predictably enough, this has led sometimes to albinos being gruesomely murdered.  The government told the media to stop reporting dramatically on this phenomenon, which spawns all sorts of conspiracy theories.

Things I've personally heard and mostly second-hand, quoted as well as I can remember:

From a VSO couple:

There was an old woman found naked in a rice basket in the street of Dar-es-Salaam.   A crowd beat her to death because they assumed she must have been flying through the air in the rice basket, because how else would she have gotten there? 

From a PCV stationed in Lufinga:

Wizards have these magic beanstalks, you know, like F***ing Jack, and plant them in the ground beside a church and climb up to the roof.   In the morning, people see them on the church roof and know they are wizards.  People also say women with red eyes are witches and not, you know the result of bending over the jiko [stove] too long.

By the way, Kiswahili doesn't make a gender distinction between witch and wizard, the word you will hear translated both ways is mchawi.

From my brother in my homestay family, when I saw a man being beaten to death on tv and asked why, because this was a wee itty bit disturbing, and the explanation made it worse:

Because that man is a witch.  That's what we have to do to witches.  Witches can make a giant leap over a building.  They can come through walls and into your home.  Sometimes they sit on you while you are asleep.  If they sit on your head you wake up with headache, because they are doing this to your head all night [demonstrates mauling a pillow].  Sometimes, while you are sleeping they take your body and force you to dig on their farm all night, even though you are asleep, and then you wake up and you slept but you are so tired!  Can you imagine?  [Me: if they are so powerful, how can people hurt them?] Witches have rules.  They only have power between midnight and 4am.  If they are jumping over buildings and stay out too late, people can see them and know they are witches.  Also, there are people, witch doctors, and they know about witches.  They point to the people who are witches and then the witches are killed.   [Me: what if the witch doctors are wrong?]   The witch-doctors know how to find witches, I heard one witch doctor entered a man's house and told people to dig one part of the floor.  The people dug up the floor and found bones and knew the man was a witch.  Can you imagine?  Look there on the tv [where the image of the man being dragged bloody across the ground is being repeated], that man did not make a sound while they were beating him, can you imagine?   I can see by your eyes you are scared, you scientists, you think magic doesn't exist, but how do you explain this?  Once, with my own eyes, I saw magic.  I was at a graduation for a friend, it was outside and there was a storm coming.  An old man there in the audience stood up, faced the rain, and held out his hand.  The rain stopped, like it had hit a wall, and there was a clear line between the wet ground and the dry ground.  How do you explain that?